The Firefox team has posted the first Firefox beta to carry the 3.5 version number, and it's a pretty hefty update. What's included? For starters, there's improved private browsing, and the lightning-fast TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

If you feel like 3.5 has kind of appeared out of the blue, you're not crazy—the Firefox team deemed this set of changes as too significant for a 3.1beta4 designation, and gave it a more impressive name.

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But boring Mozilla politics aside, this release—the final beta for this cycle—is more than another 3.1 build, and actually deserves its half-step name boost: The private mode is accompanied by much broader options than either Chrome's or Safari 4's, the geocaching and HTML 5 video and audio features are pretty cool, at least on concept, and an undo close feature can heroically salvage lost tabs. Most importantly, with TraceMonkey and a few other rendering engine tweaks, the browser at least feels faster than 3.0, so it's definitely worth a download. Full feature list below. [The Inquirer]

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 10 months. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use, and adding new features for users:

* This beta is now available in 70 languages - get your local version.
* Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
* Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
* The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
* Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
* Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 and elements,
downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data
storage for applications, and SVG transforms.